Digital-to-analog conversion is becoming an increasingly important feature in many electronic devices. For example, wireless communications devices implement digital-to-analog conversion to convert digital data to an analog form for wireless transmission from an antenna, and hard disk-drive (HDD) applications implement digital-to-analog conversion for servo control of the disk-drive. Thus, digital-to-analog converter (DAC) circuits have been developed to provide digital-to-analog conversion for any of a variety of electronic device applications. However, there is an increasing demand for integrated circuits (ICs) to be fabricated to have a reduced silicon area for the manufacture of smaller and lower cost electronic devices.
Additional design considerations for a given DAC circuit can include differential non-linearity (DNL), which can be associated with resolution, and integral non-linearity (INL), which can be associated with accuracy. A variety of DAC circuits implement resistors, such as poly-silicon resistors, to generate the analog version of the digital input signal. Designers of typical DAC ladder circuits typically design the resistors to be of a sufficient physical size for proper resistance matching of the resistors, such that error associated with DNL and/or INL can be substantially mitigated.